Jane has watched every single one of his TV appearances she can find on YouTube, dating back to when he first solved the John Fuller murder. She recalls the same features that are currently concealed by shadows, the sight of Troy’s swoon-worthy jawline and thick, muscular neck. These fragmented memories juxtapose with the reality of his fingers working their way inside of her and intensify the delicious, toe-curling thrill of ambition meeting lust. So when she hears a strange crackling sound, she assumes it’s her own dress being torn away from her.
When Troy goes still, Jane takes this as her cue. She reaches for his crotch and is relieved when her hand closes around something hard and thick. She starts to stroke him—it’s much bigger than she expected—and she’s trying to think of the nastiest, dirtiest way to say this to him when she realizes something about the thing isn’t right. The surface of his cock is spiny and slick.
When she realizes the darkness has tricked her, Jane stumbles backward. She sees Troy’s shadow bent at the waist; the fluid-filled, throaty sounds coming from him are not strangled, lustful groans. Choking. He’s choking. A thick strand of shadow juts from his open mouth and up toward the dark ceiling; a sliver of light from the nearby window falls across its spiny length.
The thing Jane just released from her right hand has the body and tense energy of a serpent, and it has now reached an elephantine length in the darkness between her and Troy, curving at the tip, coated in a slick substance that has to be blood. Troy’s blood… because the damn thing has punched right through his—they’re connected. Holy shit. It’s the same goddamn thing and it’s gone RIGHT THROUGH—
Jane falls ass-first to the floor before this deranged thought can complete itself. The first scream will feel too much like a surrender, so she tries to screw her jaw shut, which even then has her cursing madly under her breath as she scrambles toward the wall and its racks of gardening tools.
By the time she’s closed her hands around the handle of the axe hanging on a nearby shelf, two more snakes of darkness have punched up through the dirty floor, and Jane Percival glimpses the impossible luminescence coursing through one shimmering white blossom before its petals open like a snake’s jaws… and the entire flower clamps down over Troy Mangier’s bulging right eye.
A white pulse streaks through the flower, then the pulse becomes a bright-green glow that courses through the entire tangle of stalks, illuminating its growing, snarled structure. The flower and Troy’s flesh have merged somehow, and the vine just behind the flower swells in thickness. And then Troy’s head has vanished inside a thickening tangle of… she’s about to think of them as snakes again, but even as she pulls the axe free from its shelf, a very steady voice inside of her head corrects her: Vines. They are vines. Look…
And because she can’t bring herself to scream just yet, because only decisive action will hold the nightmarish impossibility of all of this at bay, Jane Percival draws the axe back over one shoulder and swings. She is convinced that one good whack will send this creature back down into the ground, that a thing without eyes and a face will react to any swift and terrible blow with pure fear and total retreat.
And yet it doesn’t, and she’s distracted by the sound she made when the axe hit its shifting, growing target—a raspy grunt that threatens sobs. Then she understands. She feels the hot, wet spray and sees how terrible her aim was. The blade has sliced clean through a knot of vine around Troy’s leg, and the eruption of blood is fearsome, arterial, and the vines do not retreat. Rather, they close thirstily over the wound instead, and suddenly Troy Mangier is completely entombed.
The vines are crawling up and over the spot where his head and shoulders were just an instant before, and now they’re coming down on themselves, making a shape that tells her Troy has been devoured from the crown of his head to the center of his chest. She realizes the rest of him is almost gone too, and that’s when Jane Percival finally starts to scream.
6
When the screaming starts, Nova Thomas is washing Caitlin Chaisson’s best china and wondering whether or not to tell her father she saw Troy sneak off into the garden with one of the pretty white ladies from the catering company. Troy must have been drunk as a skunk—otherwise he would have known to pull off his shiny gold necktie. But he didn’t, and the thing winked at Nova each time the shadowy couple passed just outside the halo of one of the security lights fixed on the back of the house.
For the past few minutes since he escorted the last guests to their parked cars, Nova’s father has been proudly telling stories about Spring House like he, Willie Thomas, owned the place, all the while pouring leftover champagne for the catering staff and valets, who are cleaning the kitchen in a controlled frenzy. But Nova’s glass of bubbly sits sparkling and untouched on the counter beside her. It feels strangely like a bribe from the birthday girl herself, and after three years at LSU listening to professors lecture on the real and bloody history of sugarcane plantations like Spring House, Nova isn’t all that inclined to celebrate some spoiled white lady who lives off her dead parents and still treats Nova as if she were a dumb child.
Then a woman is screaming somewhere out in the dark, and Nova’s resentments are forgotten. Her father stands frozen, an upended champagne bottle in hand.
When the overflows, the chef reaches up and rights the bottle, but he too is staring out the large picture window toward the shadowy gardens and the source of those terrible, piercing screams.
The bottle smashes to the floor as Willie runs out the back door.
Nova runs after him.
She’s one hundred percent sure Caitlin’s found her husband with that girl in the shed, and now all hell’s about to break loose. And what if Troy’s got some kind of gun or who knows what? And the way her daddy is with Caitlin (Miss Caitlin to him, every time), always acting like her happy house Negro, he’s bound to do something stupid to defend her and—
“Daddy, stop.Daddy!”
Her foot catches on something. Her hands break her fall on the flagstone path. When she looks back, she sees that some kind of eruption in the planter behind her has tossed several bricks onto her path.
By the time he throws open the door to the gardening shed, Nova is struggling to her feet, scanning her surroundings, trying to get her balance.
What happens next has the quality of a dream’s last few minutes, that moment just before the dreamer starts to awake—crystal clear but somehow paper-thin and unreal.
The woman who explodes from the shed is so covered in dirt and blood Nova doesn’t recognize her. What she does recognize, though, is that she’s got an axe raised over one shoulder, and when she swings it, Nova lets out a sound that is more animal than human. The earth seems to fly by under her feet, but it’s not enough—the head of the axe is aimed straight at her father, and her breath freezes in her lungs as she leaps.
He ducks. The blade nicks his shoulder anyway, and he goes down. Nova leaps before the woman has time to raise the axe again. There’s no fight in the woman’s body when Nova slams her against the wall of the shed. Nova realizes the woman has dropped the axe only when both of the lunatic’s dirt-smeared hands are fending off Nova’s blows.
“You crazy bitch!” Nova hears herself scream. “You crazy white bitch!”
Her father is shouting her name with a strength and confidence that tells her he’s not badly injured. But her anger is a wild and uncontrollable thing; it flows copiously through valves that have been opened in her only recently by education and history and a new sense of self that one of her professors defined as personhood.